Despite their incredible diversity, stunning success, and marvelous adaptations, the evolution of arthropods is actually fairly typical. Their evolutionary history has been shaped by the same processes that operate on all lineages: natural selection, speciation, extinction, opportunity, and constraint. Every branch on the tree of life has its own fascinating story involving these same elements. Arthropods are indeed amazing, but the evolutionary processes that made them that way are typical and have shaped all life, from hummingbirds to whales, coral to bacteria, and oak trees to humans.